Girls
Network: HBO
4 out of 5 stars
Over the past decade, HBO has built a reputation for having some of the most critically and commercially acclaimed dramas. However, one of its earliest and longest-running successes was the half-hour comedy Sex and the City, which followed four women living in New York City.
With Girls, HBO’s latest original series, the premium cable network has returned to its roots, though it is now seeking a much wider audience than before. Yes, Girls is a half-hour comedy that follows the lives of four women living in New York City, but that’s where similarities to Sex and the City pretty much end.
By featuring humor and conflicted characters aimed a wider audience, Girls succeeds in creating its own identity as a female ensemble geared at dealing with serious issues among all the comedy.
In Girls, Lena Dunham, the show’s creator and writer, also stars as Hannah Horvath , a woman two years out of college and trying to make it in New York City. The first episode opens with Hannah learning her parents are no longer willing to support her, and she’s finally got to make good on her efforts to become a writer.
The series also follows her friends Marnie (Allison Williams), who feels trapped in her relationship and Jessa ( Jemima Kirke ), a Bohemian world-traveler unsure of her place in the world. Rounding out the cast is Jessa’s cousin and roommate, Shoshanna ( Zosia Mamet ).
Right away it becomes clear Girls is going to be a show about struggles. In the pilot, Hannah loses her internship and is seen dating a self-centered carpenter named Adam (Adam Driver). Relationships are strained as the different women all struggle to figure out what they’re doing with their lives.
Girls works well in making each of the females likeable in their own way. Shoshanna comes across as the most ditzy member of the group, and she’s never portrayed in a mean-spirited way. On a similar note, though Jessa is shown as aloof and cold, her love for her friends is still prevalent.
Fortunately, for all of the serious moments, there’s still plenty of humor to be found. While there aren’t a lot of laugh out loud jokes in Girls, fans of The Office will be right at home watching the characters, particularly Hannah, put themselves in increasingly awkward, cringe-worthy situations.
A lot of those situations are also highly sexual in nature. Girls is an HBO show, which means there’s a great deal of nudity and sex to be found. While these situations are always in service to the plot, let this serve as fair warning to those who are uncomfortable with such material.
Girls also succeeds in avoiding the stereotypical elements often seen in shows starring women. Girls isn’t a story about Hannah’s search for true love. It’s simply a story about struggle and survival in the big city with the trials and tribulations of being fresh out of college and unsure of what to do with your life.
Dunham has said in interviews her goal is not to speak against shows like Sex and the City, but to portray the lives of different types of women. That said, there are still plenty of nods to what has come before, particularly Sex and the City, which Shoshanna is a huge fan of.
Again, these references are never done in a mean-spirited way, but simply as a means of developing the different characters. A discussion over a women’s self-help book is concerned more with showcasing the girls’ individual feelings about the material than the book itself.
Overall, Girls is quick to set up a cast of characters who play well off each other and endear themselves to the audience. The way those characters react in both serious and comedic situations is what really brings them to life, and it’s impressive a new show is able to do that so well in its first episode.
Girls airs Sundays at 10:30 p.m . on HBO.
